Lillian Evelyn Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) spent her life advocating the application of psychology, and helped shape the development of applied psychology in the early 20th century. Only recently, scholars have begun to understand and recognize Gilbreth's contributions (see Kelly &…

Richard Muther is the founder of IHPP, Richard Muther & Associates, and Muther International. He is widely respected as an industrial engineer and management consultant, and has been called "the father of systematic planning."

A mechanical engineer and an early member of the ASME, Frank Gilbreth is considered by many to be the Father of Management Engineering. Born in Fairfield, ME, on July 7, 1868, Gilbreth broke into the construction industry as a bricklayer…

The year 1924—at a factory in Cicero, Illinois—saw the start of two of the most important developments ever in managerial thinking. In May that year Walter Shewhart described the first control chart which launched statistical process control and quality improvement.…

In 1950, Japanese businessmen turned to an obscure American from Wyoming to help them rebuild an economy shattered in World War II. That industrial expert, W. Edwards Deming, taught Japan's manufacturers how to produce top quality products economically. The Japanese…

After a thirty-two year career with Ford Motor Company, including eight years as president, Lee Iacocca engineered one of business history's greatest comebacks at Chrysler Corporation. His success, coupled with appearances in television commercials and his best-selling book, made him…

Taiichi Ohno is credited with creating the just-in-time production system. He still feels today that the goal of Toyota is to shorten the time line, from the moment the customer places an order to the point where the cash is…

Frederick Winslow Taylor devised a system he called scientific management, a form of industrial engineering that established the organization of work as in Ford's assembly line. This discipline, along with the industrial psychology established by others at the Hawthorne Works…

Shigeo Shingo is perhaps a lesser known Quality Guru in the West, although his impact on Japanese industry, and less directly on Western industry, has been very large. To quote Norman Bodek, President of Productivity Inc.: "If I could give…

Henry Laurence Gantt's legacy to management is the Gantt Chart. Accepted as a commonplace project management tool today, it was an innovation of world-wide importance in the 1920s. But the Chart was not Gantt's only legacy; he was also a…